Winner of the 2004 Pulitzer Prize Award and recognized as the best book of fiction in the 21st century by the New York Times, Edward P. Jones's The Known World is a debut novel of stunning emotional depth and unequaled literary power and continues to show its importance to the American literary canon.

Henry Townsend, a farmer, boot maker, and former slave, through the surprising twists and unforeseen turns of life in antebellum Virginia, becomes proprietor of his own plantation—as well his own slaves. When he dies, his widow Caldonia succumbs to profound grief, and things begin to fall apart at their plantation: slaves take to escaping under the cover of night, and families who had once found love under the weight of slavery begin to betray one another. Beyond the Townsend household, the known world also unravels: low-paid white patrollers stand watch as slave “speculators” sell free black people into slavery, and rumors of slave rebellions set white families against slaves who have served them for years.

An ambitious, courageous, luminously written masterwork, The Known World seamlessly weaves the lives of the freed and the enslaved—and allows all of us a deeper understanding of the enduring multidimensional world created by the institution of slavery. The Known World not only marks the return of an extraordinarily gifted writer, it heralds the publication of a remarkable contribution to the canon of American classic literature.

Winner of the 2004 Pulitzer Prize Award and recognized as the best book of fiction in the 21st century by the New York Times, Edward P. Jones's The Known World is a debut novel of stunning emotional depth and unequaled literary power and continues to show its importance to the American literary canon.

Henry Townsend, a farmer, boot maker, and former slave, through the surprising twists and unforeseen turns of life in antebellum Virginia, becomes proprietor of his own plantation―as well his own slaves. When he dies, his widow Caldonia succumbs to profound grief, and things begin to fall apart at their plantation: slaves take to escaping under the cover of night, and families who had once found love under the weight of slavery begin to betray one another. Beyond the Townsend household, the known world also unravels: low-paid white patrollers stand watch as slave “speculators” sell free black people into slavery, and rumors of slave rebellions set white families against slaves who have served them for years.

An ambitious, courageous, luminously written masterwork, The Known World seamlessly weaves the lives of the freed and the enslaved―and allows all of us a deeper understanding of the enduring multidimensional world created by the institution of slavery. The Known World not only marks the return of an extraordinarily gifted writer, it heralds the publication of a remarkable contribution to the canon of American classic literature.

Winner of the 2004 Pulitzer Prize Award and recognized as the best book of fiction in the 21st century by the New York Times, Edward P. Jones's The Known World is a debut novel of stunning emotional depth and unequaled literary power and continues to show its importance to the American literary canon.

Henry Townsend, a farmer, boot maker, and former slave, through the surprising twists and unforeseen turns of life in antebellum Virginia, becomes proprietor of his own plantation—as well his own slaves. When he dies, his widow Caldonia succumbs to profound grief, and things begin to fall apart at their plantation: slaves take to escaping under the cover of night, and families who had once found love under the weight of slavery begin to betray one another. Beyond the Townsend household, the known world also unravels: low-paid white patrollers stand watch as slave “speculators” sell free black people into slavery, and rumors of slave rebellions set white families against slaves who have served them for years.

An ambitious, courageous, luminously written masterwork, The Known World seamlessly weaves the lives of the freed and the enslaved—and allows all of us a deeper understanding of the enduring multidimensional world created by the institution of slavery. The Known World not only marks the return of an extraordinarily gifted writer, it heralds the publication of a remarkable contribution to the canon of American classic literature.

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"The Best American Novelist Whose Name You May Not Know"—Calvin Baker, The Atlantic

"A literary giant, and one of my absolute favourite writers" -TAYARI JONES, author of AN AMERICAN MARRIAGE

"An American writer with a powerful sense of vital inheritance, of history in
the blood." -John Updike, The New Yorker

Eva's Man is a gripping psychological portrait of a woman unable to love for fear of pain. Imprisoned for the bizarre murder of her lover, Eva Median Canada weaves together memory and fantasy to reveal a life tormented by the brutality of sexual abuse and emotional silence. Brilliantly experimenting with language, Jones infuses her graphic and powerful narrative of the triple yoke of race, class, and gender with a rich musical and oral idiom.

From the author of the Oprah's Book Club Selection An American Marriage, here is a beautifully evocative novel that proves why Tayari Jones is "one of the most important voices of her generation" (Essence).

Claudia Jones stood at many crossroads. Her world was one of heated battles for Black liberation, of anti-fascism in the build-up to World War II, of national liberation struggles across the Global South, of the US government persecuting her and her comrades for their activism and membership in the Communist Party. And as a Black woman, she was also determined to bring to light how race and gender are embedded in and essential to the struggles of the working class.

At a time when the hegemony of imperialism and capitalism remain strong while new contradictions and signs of struggle arise, Jones' political writings are a lesson in identifying the most urgent tasks for moving socialism, the political project of the working class, forward. From her poetry, to newspaper articles, to pamphlets, to speeches, A Fighting Dream: The Political Writings of Claudia Jones brings her to us as she was: unrelenting, fearless, and a Communist.

Claudia Jones challenges us all to stand with our principles, to build organization, and to clearly see how understanding the intersectional aspects of our struggle is crucial for the liberation of humanity and the planet.

A prize-winning sociologist’s radical vision of the social power of erotic life. 

“Fearless, candid, and bold, Sex in Public is necessary reading for anyone interested in imagining a different kind of world, one that approaches eroticism and freedom as fundamentally linked.” —Jennifer C. Nash, author of Black Feminism Reimagined

Whether we are contending with shame, healing from trauma, or experimenting in the bedroom, there is a common tendency to cast anything sexual as a problem best solved in private. Fears of judgment fuel an air of oppression around something that should be liberating. According to feminist sociologist Angela Jones, we must reject this solitary vision of desire to claim the pleasure fundamental to our freedom.

Sex in Public offers a revolutionary new paradigm for understanding sexuality. Sex is never strictly personal, but relentlessly social, shaped by power relations, and possessing outsized power of its own. To make this case, Jones charts the inner and interrelated workings of our desires, behaviors, identities, relationships, and communities. 

Guiding readers through field-leading sociology, sexual science, and the voices of sexual rule-breakers worldwide, Jones pinpoints the repressive forces that distort eroticism’s power, but also reveals our means of breaking free. Championing a rebellious spirit that uplifts bodily autonomy, justice, and care, Sex in Public makes a tantalizing promise: better sex lives and empowerment await, if only we dare to know our sexualities fully, reimagining society as we do.

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“People don’t just happen,” writes Saeed Jones. “We sacrifice former versions of ourselves. We sacrifice the people who dared to raise us. The ‘I’ it seems doesn’t exist until we are able to say, ‘I am no longer yours.’”

Haunted and haunting, How We Fight for Our Lives is a stunning coming-of-age memoir about a young, black, gay man from the South as he fights to carve out a place for himself, within his family, within his country, within his own hopes, desires, and fears. Through a series of vignettes that chart a course across the American landscape, Jones draws readers into his boyhood and adolescence—into tumultuous relationships with his family, into passing flings with lovers, friends, and strangers. Each piece builds into a larger examination of race and queerness, power and vulnerability, love and grief: a portrait of what we all do for one another—and to one another—as we fight to become ourselves.

The remarkable story of Edward McCabe, a Black man who tried to establish a Black state within the United States.

In this paradigm-shattering work of American history, Caleb Gayle recounts the extraordinary tale of Edward McCabe, a Black man who championed the audacious idea to create a state within the Union governed by and for Black people — and the racism, politics, and greed that thwarted him.
 
As the sweeping changes and brief glimpses of hope brought by the Civil War and Reconstruction began to wither, anger at the opportunities available to newly freed Black people were on the rise. As a result, both Blacks and whites searched for new places to settle. That was when Edward McCabe, a Black businessman and a rising political star in the American West, set in motion his plans to found a state within the Union for Black people to live in and govern. His chosen site: Oklahoma, a place that the U.S. government had deeded to Indigenous people in the 1830s when it forced thousands of them to leave their homes under Indian Removal, which became known as the Trail of Tears.
 
McCabe lobbied politicians in Washington, D.C., Kansas, and elsewhere as he exhorted Black people to move to Oklahoma to achieve their dreams of self-determination and land ownership. His rising profile as a leader and spokesman for Black people as well as his willingness to confront white politicians led him to become known as Black Moses. And like his biblical counterpart, McCabe nearly made it to the promised land but was ultimately foiled by politics, business interests, and the growing ambitions of white settlers who also wanted the land.
 
In Black Moses, Gayle brings to vivid life the world of Edward McCabe: the Black people who believed in his dream of a Black state, the white politicians who didn't, and the larger challenges of confronting the racism and exclusion that bedeviled Black people's attempts to carve a place in America for themselves. Gayle draws from extraordinary research and reporting to reveal an America that almost was.

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A wide-ranging collection, including two novellas and ten stories exploring complex identities, from the acclaimed author of Corregidora, The Healing, and Palmares.

“Gayl Jones’s work represents a watershed in American literature. From a literary standpoint, her form is impeccable . . . and as a Black woman writer, her truth-telling, filled with beauty, tragedy, humor, and incisiveness, is unmatched.”
—Imani Perry, author of Looking for Lorraine and Breathe

Gayl Jones, who was first edited by Toni Morrison, has been described as one of the great literary writers of the 20th century and was recently a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in fiction. This new collection of short fiction is only the second in her rich career and one that displays her strengths in the genre in many facets. Opening with two novella-length works, “Butter” and “Sophia,” this collection features Jones’s legendary talents in a range of settings and styles, from the hyperrealist to the mystical, in intricate multipart stories, in more traditional forms, and even in short fragments.

Her narrators are women and men, Black, Brown, Indigenous; her settings are historical and contemporary, in South America, Mexico, and the US; her themes center on complex identities, unorthodox longings and aspirations. She writes about spies, photographers, playground designers, cartoonists, and baristas; about workers and revolutionaries, about environmentalism, feminism, poetry, film, and love, but above all about our multicultural, multiethnic, and multiracial society.

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From one of fashion's most important changemakers, a memoir of breaking barriers

When Edward Enninful became the first Black editor in chief of British Vogue, few in the world of fashion wanted to confront how it failed to represent the world we live in. But Edward, a champion of inclusion throughout his life, rapidly changed that.
 
Edward grew up in Ghana in a world of beauty, riotous color, and strong Black women. Nurtured by his mother, a dressmaker whose West African designs had a flair for drama, he learned in her atelier what it meant for a woman to see herself as truly beautiful. But the threat of violence emerged for his family and they fled the country, becoming refugees in central London. There, Edward faced a more insidious and institutionalized kind of danger: a culture where his opportunities would be diminished because of his accent and the color of his skin.
 
A Visible Man traces an astonishing journey through one of the world’s most exclusive industries. With heart and humor, Edward candidly shares how as a Black, gay, working-class refugee, he found in fashion not only a home, but the freedom to share the world as he saw it, with Black women often at the center. Determined to reflect the times, through the course of his career he has championed those who have been pushed to the margins, placing first responders, octogenarians, and civil rights activists on the cover of Vogue. He has inspired people with new ways to dream and an exhilarating vision of what is possible, here and now.
 
Written with style, grace, and emotion, A Visible Man shines a spotlight on the career of one of the greatest creative forces of our times. It is the story of a visionary who changed not only an industry, but how we understand beauty.